Worrying Farquhar's Scholarship about Hinduism

Farquhar (1861 – 1929) was a missionary scholar who spent more than thirty years in India, as student secretary and then literary secretary of the YMCA India. He traveled widely for the sake of learning about lived Hinduism and was a popular lecturer in Christian circles. He believed that knowledge of Hinduism was necessary for a proper preaching of the Gospel. Among his well-known and influential books are Permanent Lessons of the Gita (1903), Gita and Gospel (1906), The Approach of Christ to Modern India (1913), A Primer of Hinduism (1914), Modern Religious Movements in India (1915), An Outline of the Religious Literature of India (1920), and, most famously, The Crown of Hinduism (1913), the topic of this retrospective essay. For those interested in Farquhar in general, Eric J. Sharpe's 1965 Not to Destroy but to Fulfil: The Contribution of J. N. Farquhar to Protestant Missionary Thought in India before 1914 will be the most valuable book.I have owned a copy of The Crown for decades now, in the original 1913 edition. I have occasionally glanced at it, quoted it, referred it to students interested in the history of Christianity in modern India. But I never took it very seriously, thinking it to be impressive knowledge about Hinduism too much at the service of prefixed Christian beliefs: whatever Hinduism may be, Christ is its fulfillment. But in a recent Harvard course (“Krishna and Christ—Does It Matter?”), we had occasion to read some of The Crown and Gita and Gospel, and I had to think twice: this man was a true believer, but a true scholar too. There are many things about India that he knew better than I, despite my fifty years of learning from Hindu traditions. I was also intrigued that Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (1861 – 1907), the famed Hindu scholar and Indian patriot who became a Roman Catholic and proponent of a truly Indianized Christianity, objected so strongly to Farquhar's reading of devotion to Krishna as fulfilled in Christ. Upadhyay and his peers took Farquhar seriously. Should I not?The Crown is a book of 469 pages. The long introduction makes evident Farquhar's concern about the growing awareness Christians have of the many religions ever more lively and active East and West; the risks entailed by ignorance of modern, living religions; and the need to make well-informed judgments on them and on how they relate to Christianity. There is a great temptation, he fears, not only to commend what is good in the great religions (such as have outlasted primitive, more savage ones) but also to relativize even Christianity, as if all of them are equal and should survive; and there is an equally worrisome temptation to simply dismiss the religions as entirely irrelevant. But if we know what we are talking about, Farquhar is showing us, relativism will become all the more unlikely.The introduction is followed by eleven chapters of varying lengths: (1) Vedic roots of Hinduism; (2) family structures; (3) the moral order; (4) the divine social order; (5) an overview of Hinduism; (6) Hindu philosophy (Vedanta); (7) world renunciation; (8) image-worship; (9) Hindu sects; (10) avatāra compared with Incarnation; and (11) a summary chapter arguing that Hinduism as it actually exists has many positive aspects but is also hampered by superstition, abuses, and exaggerations, and that what is best about it is invariably found in Christ and in Protestant Christianity.The Crown demonstrates a progressive, liberal understanding of Christianity, God's gift to the world. Farquhar is a key proponent of the fulfillment theory, which sought to balance Christian commitment with a more positive respect for Hinduism. Much of the book is dedicated to explicating this theory, each chapter concluding that Christ is the fulfillment really sought by Hindus in each area of practice and spirituality. The book ends on a characteristic note: The time has come when the Indian patriot must choose between tradition and the health of his country. We have already seen how Christ provides the fulfilment of each of the highest aspirations and aims of Hinduism. A little reflection on the material contained in this chapter will show that every line of light which is visible in the grossest parts of the religion reappears in Him set in healthy institutions and spiritual worship. Every true motive which in Hinduism has found expression in unclean, debasing, or unworthy practices finds in Him fullest exercise in work for the downtrodden, the ignorant, the sick, and the sinful. In Him is focused every ray of light that shines in Hinduism. He is the Crown of the faith of India. (457 – 58)Farquhar is confident too that history is on his side, since Hinduism is no match for modernity, the enlightened world that is dawning. Of course, what has actually happened in the century-plus since his book appeared in print does not fit with Farquhar's expectations. The Christian West has fragmented; the notion that history is moving inexorably toward Christ is received with increasing skepticism; Hinduism has not disappeared—about 80 percent of the population of India today is Hindu. Time seems not to be on the side of the Christianization of India.Farquhar was a serious scholar who worked relentlessly to identify the Hinduism of his era, its reality on the ground, its personal and social strengths, and its undeniable weaknesses. Nothing in The Crown is merely his postulation of what he wanted to be true; he bothered to learn, endlessly. Yet it is not clear how his impressive learning mattered, beyond serving to confirm already firm Christian beliefs. At what point does his learned discourse shift over from the accumulation of scholarly information to a confident assertion of the fulfillment discourse? Is Farquhar moving from data to judgment about the data, or does his faith always hold sway, beginning to end, facts earnestly generated to support known conclusions, as if to say, “Of course Christ is the Way; here is some research in support of that undeniable truth”?Consider chapter 8, “The Work of Men's Hands,” on the theme of idolatry. Farquhar offers an impressively detailed explanation of the consecration of idols, of how idols are personalized and are thought to make the divine person vividly present. He commends the hypothesis that idolatry is not of Aryan, Vedic origin but older and indigenous to India. He studies the view of learned theologians like Rāmānuja (eleventh century) and readily admits that Rāmānuja was no benighted pagan. He also notes modern reformist discomfort with idolatry, yet too the limited effectiveness of such discomfort in the face of traditionalist pushback. Still, he concludes: But idolatry is dying among educated Hindus; and the exigencies of the time will soon compel Indian leaders to seek to destroy the practice among the common people. For the belief that every image is a living god who is able to bless or curse, and that food, water, flowers and every other thing that comes in contact with the image is charged with supernatural power, is the chief source of the mass of superstitions under which the Hindu people lived enslaved. . . . Idolatry is thus one of the chief hindrances to the progress of India. The clear-sighted patriot will do his utmost to wean the simple Hindu villager from idols. (342)Fortunately, Jesus satisfies the need for images that really show God the Father through God the Son: Thus there is a great truth behind all idolatry, the truth that at any moment, in any place, we may have access to the Father's heart, but it is pitiably distorted by idols and mixed up with the most degrading and polluting superstitions. Christ by His life and teaching reveals the Father in His holiness, His self-sacrificing love, and His readiness to answer prayer, thus making idolatry impossible, and enabling us to worship the Father in spirit and in truth. (350)Farquhar's steady faith in the given truth of Christianity and in the inevitable waning of Hinduism risks deflating the importance of the learning he works so hard to accumulate and defend, since he knew from the start the conclusions to be drawn from his learning.Farquhar might have offered defenses of his fulfillment theology that were not so dependent on the accumulation of data and Christian assessments of it. He does not travel the Catholic road of highlighting natural knowledge of God shared by all humans. Nor does he appeal to some alternative common ground shared by people of all faiths and none, even if he assumes that most Christian truths are perfectly in accord with truths known to all. Nor does he offer himself as an example of someone who learned deeply from another religion. He is no Ronald Nixon (1898 – 1965), a younger contemporary who became a Vais.n.ava devotee and took the name Krishna Prem, “lover of Krishna.” Farquhar mentions and cherishes personal friendships with Hindus and emphasizes the need to respect Hindu believers even while hoping for more from them and for them. But he remains ever reticent as to what if anything he personally learned from Hinduism, offering little testimony from his own life as to how Hinduism changed him. Did he not find some personal fulfillment in Hinduism, all those years? Not a word on this subject in nearly five hundred pages?That a great missionary treatise over a century old has not aged well is unsurprising. But still timely is the difficult balance he sought to achieve between what we learn about the world by our study of nature and human nature, culture, politics, and religion, and what we desperately want the world to be, by the faith traditions to which many of us still adhere. As I put The Crown back on my shelf for another few years, I am grateful that Farquhar has forced me to ask how my own study of Hinduism relates to my own Christian faith—I am a Jesuit who has studied Hinduism most of my life—and I am determined all the more to interrogate myself, to find out how my decades of learning and my life of faith actually fit together.